TikTok’s top star Khaby Lame has fled the US after immigration agents detained him in Las Vegas.
The Senegalese-Italian influencer, whose legal name is Seringe Khabane Lame, rose to fame while during Covid, skewering ludicrous ‘life hacks’ on social media. He currently has more than 162 million followers on TikTok alone.
After attending the Met Gala in New York last month, Lame was accused of ‘overstaying the terms of his visa’.
The 25-year-old was detained on Friday at Harry Reid International Airport.
He was allowed a voluntary departure, which allows those facing removal from the US to avoid a deportation order on their immigration record.
This could prevent them from being allowed back into the the country for up to a decade.
A statement from ICE said: ‘US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Seringe Khabane Lame, 25, a citizen of Italy, June 6, at the Harry Reid International Airport, Las Vegas, Nevada for immigration violations.’
Lame’s departure from the country comes amid ongoing protests against Donald Trump’s intensified immigration raids, centred in L, in which dozens of people were detained, including at their workplaces.
Hundreds of thousands of people joined demonstrations against ICE in LA, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Omaha and Seattle.
In response, Trump has deployed about 700 active-duty Marines in LA to join the National Guard troops.
The number of people arrested during the LA protests keeps climbing, with nearly 200 people arrested and taken into custody Tuesday – before the curfew that was introduced for pockets of the city, from 8pm until 6am.
Mayor Karen Bass said that 23 businesses were looted during four days of demonstration.
‘We reached a tipping point,’ she said during a news conference Tuesday.
Trump has left open the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act, which authorizes the president to deploy military forces inside the US to suppress rebellion or domestic violence or to enforce the law in certain situations.
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It is one of the most extreme emergency powers available to a US president.
‘If there’s an insurrection, I would certainly invoke it. We’ll see,’ he said from the Oval Office.
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